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One of the SEC’s most famous products stirred up a bit of controversy last week. Charles Barkley, the greatest hoops player in Auburn history, went on a tirade against the use of advanced analytics in the NBA, saying that the best teams don’t need to use analytics if they have the best players.
We don’t need to go into all the reasons why Sir Charles is dead wrong; he’s already been skewered enough for his outdated views. We do have some bad news for the Chuckster: analytics are the way of the sports world now, even in college football.
To make sure you’re more informed than the Round Mound of Rebound, here are five statistical terms you may begin hearing more of as advanced stats become more and more a part of normal football conversation.
- Efficiency — While it is a broad term, efficiency does have a definition. It’s a measure of a team’s success rate (see below), both unadjusted and adjusted. It measures how consistently a team can maintain drives.
- Success rate — This one comes from Football Outsiders, one of the sites that pioneered advanced metrics in football. Success rate is a way to measure whether or not a play accomplished enough to be considered successful, determined by the number of yards picked up on a given down and distance. On first down, a team must pick up half of the yards needed for a first down. On second down, it jumps to 70 percent of the yards needed, third down and fourth down go to 100 percent.
- Stuff rate — Another from Football Outsiders, stuff rate measures how often an offensive line allows a run play to be stifled at or behind the line of scrimmage. For instance, Alabama finished 2014 ninth in the country, allowing runs to be stuffed only 14.2 percent of the time, while Tennessee was 116th and allowed stuffs on 21.3 percent of its runs.
- S&P+ ratings — One of FO’s all-encompassing measures are its S&P+ ratings. It pulls in four factors: success rate, drive efficiency, opponent adjustments and expected points per play. The metric filters out garbage time and clock-killing plays, providing an adjusted metric with which to rate college teams. For instance, Ohio State ended the season with an S&P+ rating of 280.8, while Alabama was right behind them at 272.8.
- Adjusted pace — You’ve heard all about pace of play from watching teams crank up the speed with which they get plays off to coaches voicing concerns on the issue. Adjusted pace takes into consideration the number of plays a team runs as well as the types of plays; pass-heavy teams tend to run more plays, since passes are far more likely to stop the clock. The figure used is an expected plays per game, based on run-pass ratio and success rate.
A former freelance journalist from Philadelphia, Brett has made the trek down to SEC country to cover the greatest conference in college football.
